Health-Care Reform Opponents’ New Tactic: Yelling Loudly

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Right-wingers aren’t going to town halls these days just to babble incoherently about President Obama’s secret Kenyan birth. They’re also attending to obnoxiously chant and shout about health-care reform. Over the weekend, Texas congressman Lloyd Doggett, Pennsylvania congressman Patrick Murphy, and Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter all met with hordes of angry, sign-waving citizens at their town-hall meetings. Needless to say, this is not the way well-meaning adults engage in a constructive conversation about a topic of national importance. But that’s because the mobs aren’t concerned about making health-care reform better. Despite their seeming grassroots nature, the mobs are reportedly composed of Tea Party types backed and organized by anti-reform groups, who apparently believe things are just perfect asis.

But because this is a free country and people have the right to shout like banshees if they want to, the protests are likely to continue as long as congressmen keep holding town-hall meetings, which they need to do in order to explain health-care reform in the first place. Which means Democrats are now plotting a counterstrategy that includes demonizing and delegitimizing the more rowdy participants of the movement and hoping that the media joins in. Like this afternoon, when press secretary Robert Gibbs compared the mobs to the “Brooks Brothers Brigade” that sowed chaos during the 2000 Florida recount. Of course, the Democrats are hoping to have more success against this faux-grassroots effort, since that one actually, you know,worked.